


ouroboros

by verity



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Bodies of Water, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Memory Alteration, Mystery, Nemeton, Quests, Teen Wolf Reverse Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 15:22:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Standing in a borrowed windbreaker that goes down to her knees, watching Stiles nearly lose an eye to the bungee cords they used to strap Danny's canoe onto the roof of the Jeep, Lydia says, "Do you have any idea what you're doing?"</p><p>"I watched a video about rowing on YouTube while you were in the bathroom," Stiles says. "Come on, it's 10PM on a school night and we're about to go canoeing on a lake that appeared out of nowhere last week, this is your sticking point?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	ouroboros

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [[Art for] Ouroboros by verity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147737) by [pentapus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentapus/pseuds/pentapus). 



> Thanks to pentapus for the incredible art and being so wonderful to work with, and to Ashe, Clio, Luz, and Scout for being beta superstars. Any errors remaining are my own.
> 
>   
> [[art masterpost]](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1147737) [[twreversebang community]](http://twreversebang.livejournal.com/)  
> 

The first life Lydia takes is freely given.

She bends over the tub and pushes down on Stiles's shoulders, tries not to look too hard at his face, focuses on the ice cubes that drift over it like floes. The cold works against him; it's not long before his limbs jerk, his lips go blue. Hypoxic convulsion. It's hard to believe she's strong enough to do this, but the evidence is before her.

—

Lydia hasn't blacked out and appeared next to a corpse in almost a year when she falls through what was solid ground a moment ago and is now water eighteen inches deep.

The lake in the Preserve shows up on Google Maps. It's also in the battered road atlas of Northern California that Stiles keeps in the back of the jeep, a little blue speck the size of a pinhead amidst a wash of green. "I'm not imagining this," Lydia says. " _It wasn't there_." She shoves the atlas off her lap and balls her hands into fists. Her feet squelch in her ruined boots.

They're on a routine Thursday night patrol. Emphasis on routine, because this is supposed to be over. Everything is supposed to be over. The nemeton is dormant, the territory is securely in Scott's hold, Peter is dead. Her mind is supposed to—

Next to her in the driver's seat, Stiles is solid, reassuring, and unbearably certain. He hands her a roll of paper towels and says, "I believe you."

"Shut up," Lydia says, looking at the map, the blue dot where the nemeton should be.

—

The second life she takes is Peter's.

Lydia has soft, manicured hands, devoid of Allison's practiced calluses, Stiles's magic, or Scott's claws. She doesn't need them to do the job. She buys a folding knife off eBay and travels all the way up to Oregon to wash it in a sacred spring before she soaks the blade in a wolfsbane tincture.

The blood gets everywhere.

—

Cora helped Lydia salt and burn Peter's body. Then she left for points unknown with her new Alpha status, her brother, and according to Stiles, the location of the nemeton, which she took from everyone else.

Brow creased, he says, "You don't remember that?"

"That's not what I remember," Lydia says.

"Okay," Stiles says.

He doesn't suggest that they tell Scott.

—

Under the influence of the nemeton, Allison was haunted by her aunt's ghost. Stiles saw everyone else's. His dead mother dogged his footsteps, Laura Hale called to him from the forest, Allison's mother stabbed herself in his bed every night. He hallucinated other things, like murdering Scott and Derek, like waking up in Lydia's arms. There were periods of lucidity during which his frantic texts to everyone turned painfully prophetic: Allison almost killed Lydia, Peter tried to bury Scott alive, Scott nearly tore Isaac apart.

After Lydia bled Peter dry on the nemeton and closed its window into everyone's psyches, Stiles got better.

Slowly.

Some days, he still looks at Lydia like he doesn't know which one of her he's seeing.

—

On Saturday morning, Lydia heads out into the woods with Allison, steers them toward the lake.

"I don't think I've ever been out in this part of the Preserve." Allison drags her toe through the sand and waterlogged branches that litter the shoreline. "The mist is kind of creepy."

They've been here dozens of times before. Lydia shrugs and tamps down her panic. "That's normal. Vapor pressure and water temperature. I'm more concerned about the lake being here at all."

Lapping gently at their feet, the lake doesn't look particularly ominous. Camouflage, probably.

Maybe.

—

Stiles drops into the seat next to her at lunch on Wednesday, faux-casually elbowing Danny down the table to make room. "Hey, so, Lydia—"

Lydia holds her place in _The Long Summer_ with a finger, declines to acknowledge Danny's skeptical glance. "Is this urgent?"

"What are you doing tonight?" Stiles says.

"Washing my hair," Lydia says. "Why do you ask?"

Stiles huffs, flicking his eyes up to meet hers. He's grown into his lanky frame, lost the swamp of layers that used to hide it. "Would your answer change if I happened to have petri dishes and some growth medium and a field kit and a lake?"

"You know just what to say to a girl," she says sweetly. "Pick me up at 6:30."

Lydia dresses with the same attention to detail she does for every date. She changes into a plain knit blouse, the jeans she bought last year specifically for premeditated supernatural exploits, and thigh-length trench coat she's not afraid to ruin; her hair goes up in a loose ponytail. At least her rainboots are Coach.

"Ready for action, I see," Stiles says when she swings herself up into the Jeep. "Any stops to make, or—"

Lydia sighs. "Just drive."

It's her third trip out to the Preserve in the last week. The lake looks bigger than it did on Saturday, which would seem improbable if Lydia hadn't fallen into it when it winked into existence.

"How big is this lake, anyway?" she says, twisting the plastic grocery bag filled with empty sample bottles around her wrist.

Stiles whips out his phone. "Uh, like half a mile across, maybe 75 acres—wait." He digs around in his pocket, pulls up a wrinkled scrap of paper. "Huh, that's not—"

Lydia takes the paper from him, smoothes it out. It's the AP Physics C E&M worksheet from Monday, and on the back is a list of facts clearly copied from Wikipedia in Stiles's scratchy, irregular shorthand.

 

>   
> Chalk Pond  
>  loc: BC (uninc/preserve)  
>  39º14'28"N 120º53'26"W  
>  kettle hole  
>  SA 38 ac (~ .3mi x .2mi)  
>  av d 12ft  
>  max d 36ft

"So they can alter maps, reference articles," Lydia says. "But not your notes. That's interesting. I wonder what they want."

"They?" Stiles is still staring at the paper, eyes occasionally flicking up to the water.

"Lakes that edit Wikipedia don't just _appear_ , Stiles." When Lydia squints, she can see something out on the water—an island, or maybe just a cluster of logs, partially obscured by the mist. She can't make it out from the shore. "Do you see that?"

"Hmm," Stiles says. "I think Danny has a boat."

—

Standing in a borrowed windbreaker that goes down to her knees, watching Stiles nearly lose an eye to the bungee cords they used to strap Danny's canoe onto the roof of the Jeep, Lydia says, "Do you have any idea what you're doing?"

"I watched a video about rowing on YouTube while you were in the bathroom," Stiles says. "Come on, it's 10PM on a school night and we're about to go canoeing on a lake that appeared out of nowhere last week, this is your sticking point?"

Lydia catches the end of the canoe as it tips off the roof and grunts, staggering.

Together, they lower the canoe to the ground. It's fiberglass, scuffed, a once-vivid shade of orange. The rough edge of a dent in one side scrapes against Lydia's palm; not hard enough to draw blood, but it stings. Lydia pulls her hand back, cups it with her uninjured one. Stiles glances up. "You okay?"

Lydia nods; if she opens her mouth, she'll just laugh.

"Yeah, okay, fine," Stiles says. He pulls the oars out of the back of the Jeep and tosses them inside the canoe. "Come on, I'm not hauling this down there by myself."

Danny gave them some waterproof pouches for their phones and keys, too; _he's_ canoed before. Lydia shoves hers into one of the windbreaker's pockets and zips it shut before she picks up her end of the canoe and helps carry it down to the water.

—

"Hey," she says, leaning forward, reaching out. Stiles is solid underneath her hand, shoulders corded with taut muscle from years of lacrosse and warding off supernatural violence. "Go right ahead, I think I see—"

"No, that's just rocks," he says. "We're still pretty far off."

Lydia squints into the mist. It's only grown thicker as they ventured out on the water, almost true fog; she can barely see the waning moon in the sky when she tips back her head to look above them. "It looked closer from the shore."

"I texted Scott," Stiles says. "He'll come looking for us if we don't call him by midnight."

"Maybe we should have—" The sample kits are still in the back of Stiles's car, the little bottles now full of lake water. Lydia could have taken them back to the school, analyzed them, run the numbers, run the—she doesn't usually leap to action. The boys in the pack are impulsive; it's the girls who act with deliberation.

Stiles stops rowing and turns back to look at her; the moonlight glances silver off his skin. Ahead of them, there's only ghostly mist shading into darkness. "Do you want to go back?"

"No," Lydia says, tightening her grip on her oar.

There's no reception out here, but that doesn't matter. Scott doesn't have to be near them to hear Lydia's scream.

—

The island rises suddenly out of the fog.

Trees straggle around the shoreline, rough sand littered with driftwood. It doesn't look particularly suspicious, but neither does it look inviting. Stiles manages to get them safely on shore and out of the canoe without getting Lydia soaked to the knees. His own luck is not so good. "Fuck, I hate wet jeans," he says, fingers scrabbling on the line he's trying to tether the boat with.

Lydia pushes him aside and takes over. Topology is her area, after all. "Are you going to be okay?" The night air is cool, and denim doesn't dry fast.

"I'll cope," Stiles says.

They didn't plan well for this. They didn't plan at all. Lydia planned everything with Peter, down to the last detail, how his blood would well up beneath her knife, one last sacrifice to deconsecrate this defiled space, the stump, the nemeton. Sometimes Lydia feels his absence in the back of her head like an unwanted, missing limb; she dreams about him. Now the brambles of the trees on the island scratch her skin, tug against jeans and slide across her windbreaker. Ahead of her, Stiles is taking the worst of it; there's blood on his face, a long smear from cheek to ear when he tries to wipe it away.

—

Like the fairy story, thorned walls and magic conceal the island's sleeping treasure, waiting to be awoken by someone's Judas kiss.

Lydia would know it anywhere, those familiar branches rising up toward the sky, the twisted trunk that she drew over and over in her notebook. The branches are no longer bare, heavy with green leaves, and the tree isn't alone, either, surrounded by smaller sisters. Their power hums beneath her feet, through her veins.

This is a true nemeton, a sacred grove.

Stiles turns away for a moment to meet Lydia's eyes. "This is where it was before, right? Before—"

"Before the Preserve went all _Mists of Avalon_?" Lydia says. "Yeah, I think so."

She squares her shoulders and reaches out to take Stiles's hand. They've come this far; they're going to finish the journey.

Inside the rough circle of trees, the air feels charged with electricity, so dense that Lydia can hardly breathe. She squeezes Stiles's fingers and he squeezes back. "This isn't what I thought it would be like," Stiles says. "I thought it would be—"

"Eviller?" Lydia says.

Stiles shrugs; the wound on his cheek is clotting, turning darker. "This one doesn't feel like a murder tree."

Lydia draws him closer to the biggest tree, the one she knows so well. She gets close enough to press her palm to its flank. There's a strange, doubled sensation of bark beneath her hand and the quick throb of a pulse beneath soft skin. "It could be." They've already spilt blood here tonight.

"I don't know if I want that responsibility," Stiles says drily.

Lydia snorts. "You're Scott's emissary. You already have it."

There's a twist to Stiles's mouth that she recognizes belatedly as a smile. "I know." He pauses for a moment. "This—it messed with my memory, Lydia. I remember coming here when I was a kid. Skinnydipping out here with Scott, fishing with my dad."

"The nemeton wants you to protect it," Lydia says.

Stiles tips back his head to stare at the branches. "I guess."

—

"This lake is a kettle hole," Stiles says as they retrace their path through the outer trees, the prickly hedges. "Like, the kind that glaciers make when they recede. Maybe it used to be here before."

"So this is like pressing the reset button," Lydia says.

Lydia helped wake the nemeton when she held Stiles beneath the water, and here they are now on this island that's rising out of the lake. Peter, the nemeton, their journey to the center: it's all circular, no neat ends, no bow to tie off.

Nothing she kills ever just stays dead.

—

On dry land, Lydia pulls out her phone and texts Scott while Stiles climbs up onto the hood of the Jeep. "You haven't had enough adventure for tonight?" she says.

Stiles shakes his head. "Unless you want to go home."

Lydia digs through the back of the car until she finds a musty-smelling wool blanket with suspiciously dark stains dotting one corner. She throws it into Stiles's lap before she hauls herself up onto the hood, feet scrabbling on the bumper until he grabs her hand and pulls her up beside him. "I can't believe you don't have spare pants in there."

Stiles winces. "So, last week, Scott—"

"I don't care," Lydia says.

"Do you care if I take off my jeans?" Stiles says.

Lydia sighs and stares out at the lake. "If your balls are chafed, I don't want to hear about it."

If she concentrates, Lydia can still see the dip of the forest floor below the trees that stood here, the winding path to the nemeton. Allison taught her to shoot somewhere out here, tugged her hips and shoulders into the correct stance while Lydia teetered on heels unsuited to the soft ground. As flawed and porous as it may be, Lydia's memory is the master copy, and as long as she's alive, these things will live on, too.

Stiles turns toward her, his bent knees brushing her side through the blanket. "Okay, I'm decent."

"There's nothing decent about you." Lydia reaches over and touches Stiles's arm, draws her fingers down from the elbow to take his hand in hers.

He raises his eyebrows when she rubs her thumb over his. "Lydia?"

"Yeah, that's me," she says.

—

Lydia has kissed Stiles before, and she's killed him, too, each time with specific and precise intent. This is different, qualitatively and quantitatively: they kiss long enough for Lydia to observe that Stiles's lips are slightly chapped and that he doesn't know where to put his hands. After some confused groping at the air, he braces one against the hood of the Jeep so that their only points of contact are their twined hands and the kiss. Lydia pulls away to look up at Stiles, his thinned mouth and thoughtful eyes. She digs her nails into the back of his hand. "If I were a hallucination, I'd be nicer."

"That's reassuring," Stiles says. He pauses. "You didn't drink any of the creepy magic lakewater, did you?"

Lydia rolls her eyes. " _Stiles_."

"Okay, okay, don't blame me for being weird about it." Stiles shifts so he's sitting up, adjusts the blanket draped over his legs. "Just—you're—and I'm not wearing any pants."

"I know," Lydia says.

When Stiles puts his hands on her waist and tugs her over onto his lap, she goes easily, straddles him with her thighs on either side of his. With her jeans and the wool blanket between them, it feels oddly chaste, like the tentative kisses boys gave her in middle school, right up until Stiles slides one hand beneath Danny's mom's windbreaker and Lydia's shirt and brings the other up to pull her mouth to his. The air on her cheeks is cool, but Stiles's mouth is warm, hot when it opens under hers, when she slides her tongue inside. His broad palms press into the small of her back, cup the base of her skull, anchoring her.

A year ago, Lydia held Stiles beneath icy water until he stopped breathing, until his lips and nailbeds turned blue. She'd do it again now if she had to. It feels like cheating that she can hold him so lightly; that he can hold her up.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ladyofthelog](http://ladyofthelog.tumblr.com) on tumblr.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [ouroboros by verity [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6660775) by [anatsuno](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anatsuno/pseuds/anatsuno), [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




End file.
